(.........Aug26) The River Of Ordinary Moments - Poem by Max Reif

Because living is a river of ordinary moments, each moment connected to the next, there is nowhere we can go to escapefrom our fate which is to mergeevery swell of the streamback into the ordinary,

and all I can hope for is that gentle, lightsense of well-being as my little canoe bobsin the current of everyday, sailing downstream, ever downstream.

I am stunned by the beauty of the ordinary, so that sometimes the ordinary seems mis-named, and yetit is ordinary because it is quiet with no fanfare:

a man picking his way through the orangesat the farmer's market, a woman taking a leisurely bath, a child playing in the grass in the back yard, all the people in a street just walking.

No one is enthroned above every one else, this river is absolutely democratic, every thrill, every intoxication flows on downstreamas does, sooner or later, every sorrow, every loss, though those are a little harder, the hole seems to take longer for the waters to fill.

No one is famous to the ordinary, you can't impress it.The ordinary is the real wife of every man, the real husband of every woman.It is where you return from all your expeditions, and it is all anyone could ever truly want.

And so today, when I received fulfillmentof a certain small desire I'd had as a poet, and I felt hands starting to tug at me inside, trying to take me somewhere, trying to hoist me on their shouldersand parade me through the streets,

it was like the dividing was beginningof everything from everything else.I felt the walls of 'I' begin to solidifyand separate me from everything, the way a butterfly feels sitting on a branch in the sun, waiting for his wings to dry and chitin to hardenafter crawling from his chrysalis, ready after that to preen and flit and die,

and I reply to those voices, 'No, thank you', and I say to those tugging hands, 'No, thank you', I do not want to betaken from the flow of the ordinaryto any pinnacle or promontory from whichI will only have to climb, or fall, down again,

I do not want to be special in that way, I want the tick of thoughts in my mind to run out and the storehouse of thoughts to be emptiedand not replaced by any others,

I want to disappear, disappearand become that currentthat all distinct drops are lost in, and thenthe ocean into which all rivers go to die

Comments about (.........Aug26) The River Of Ordinary Moments by Max Reif

Max, something told me to read you today. I didn't know what poem to choose just delved in and the title caught my eye. The imagery in this is absolutely superb, wonderful in fact. Those ordinary moments and the thought process behind the poem make me stand back in awe. I'm adding this to my favourites, I was captivated by every line. Do hope you're well. HG: -) xx(Report)Reply

If anyone presented this glorious piece to me without revealing its author and asked me to guess who wrote it, I'd say 'Max' without hesitation. The third stanza - which I wish I had written myself - says it all; your trademark to my mind is to observe that which usually goes unnoticed, to glory in it and bring it to the attention of your blinkered reader. This is going down as a favourite. It flows from beginning to end as the river you employ as analogys so skilfully. Dammit, I wish I'd written the whole piece... t x(Report)Reply